Film Series

WWI: 100 Years Removed

As we mark the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War, this multi-semester film series explores the conditions leading up to war, the harsh realities of wartime, and its effects on people and nations around the world. These cinematic reflections offer a chance to revisit the way war and violence were imagined in an earlier age, and also remind us how men and women throughout the globe remained burdened by this problem today. Each film will be introduced by a faculty expert. This film series is presented by the School of Global and International Studies and IU Cinema.

Based on the novel by Erich Maria Remarque, a group of idealistic German teens volunteer for action on the Western Front of WWI in 1914, persuaded by one of their professors. On the front, their patriotism is soon further destroyed after being introduced to the true horrors of war. Universal Pictures’ first Best Picture Academy Award® winner has been restored by the Library of Congress. (35mm presentation)

Before he took aim at the absurdities of Cold War rhetoric in Dr. Strangelove and the horrors of Vietnam in Full Metal Jacket, Stanley Kubrick directed Paths of Glory, one of cinema’s most impassioned anti-war films. Kirk Douglas is at his best as a colonel grappling with the dehumanization of combat and the foolish machinery of command in the armed forces. (2K DCP presentation)

A series of (more or less) mysterious acts of violence disturbs a traditional, authoritarian village cosmos in Northern Germany on the eve of World War One. In German, Italian, and Polish languages with English subtitles.

Filmed in the original geography, this film takes place during World War I’s Gallipoli campaign in 1915. This quasi-documentary tells the story of the unsuccessful attack on the Ottoman Straits by the British Empire and French Forces with hopes to reach Istanbul. In Turkish language with English subtitles.

In a desperate search for her fiancé who might have been killed at the Battle of the Somme fighting in the French army, a young woman uncovers the ugly complexities of the trench warfare that destroyed millions of lives between 1914 and 1918. In French and German languages with English subtitles.